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<title>What on Earth did they do to you? by kryptonite_is_my_kryptonite</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27298519">What on Earth did they do to you?</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/kryptonite_is_my_kryptonite/pseuds/kryptonite_is_my_kryptonite'>kryptonite_is_my_kryptonite</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>DCU, DCU (Comics), Superman - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Hurt Clark Kent, Hurt Superman, Hurt/Comfort, Kryptonite, Reporter Lois Lane, Superman - Freeform, Whump, kryptonite poisoning, no beta we die like womne, superman whump</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 10:22:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,116</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27298519</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/kryptonite_is_my_kryptonite/pseuds/kryptonite_is_my_kryptonite</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>When Superman comes crashing out of the sky after a fight gone wrong, Lois doesn't expect to find him in her apartment. She certainly doesn't expect to see this usually invincible alien lying on her kitchen floor, a glowing green bullet lodged between his ribs.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Clark Kent/Lois Lane</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>33</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>What on Earth did they do to you?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>As long as Lois can remember, she’s fallen for guys who are out of her league. Cooler than her, stronger than her, better at writing catchy leads than her. Her current heartthrob (who presently is chained up just feet away from her), is very cool, quite strong, but hardly seems like the writerly type.</p><p>Superman’s hands and feet are restrained by heavy duty handcuffs meant for aliens and mutants, held in place by blue energy beams. Lois watches him silently struggle against his bonds, then scream out when Lex Luthor electrocutes him for his troubles. His body convulses briefly, veined with bolts of electricity, and he goes limp for only a second before again trying his luck against the bonds.</p><p>The shock gets him again. He arches his back against it and is left twitching slightly, his breathing ragged and his eyes screwed shut.<br/>Lex takes the kryptonian’s face in his hands, stares dead in his face, says something that Lois wishes she had been able to write down (she’s chained up, in handcuffs strong enough to hold small humans, so she cannot take notes), then smiles sadistically. The man of steel, or of whatever the fuck kind of material doesn’t so much as bend under the weight of 10 metro transit busses, stares back at him with a glare more searing than his heat vision, his jaw set in a look of defiance.</p><p>Lex laughs. Shocks him again.</p><p>This time, Superman uses the heat vision.</p><p> </p><p>That image of the alien flying her home that night--his face smooth and inscrutable, his eyes, ever distant, reflecting the lights of Metropolis below--this is what she thinks of when she sees a streak of red and blue tear across the afternoon sky.</p><p>Even though she had been on her way to the library to research something for a story she had been working on, and even though she had an overfilled cup of coffee in her hands, she took off speed-walking towards the spot where he had landed—marked by a quick-dispersing cloud of concrete dust. Somewhere next to—no, it couldn’t be.</p><p>As she made her way through crowds of people, block after block closer to where Superman had landed, she began to absentmindedly wonder, then to worry, that he had landed somewhere near her apartment. Because a cosmic-level, property damaging throwdown right outside her window is exactly what she needed that morning.</p><p>Sure enough, there was a crater in the asphalt right outside her building. It looked like shattered glass, like the circular pattern left in her window the time she had visited Gotham and left her car unattended for too long. But Superman was nowhere to be found.</p><p>Suddenly, her phone rang. Her boss. She picked up.</p><p>“Yes, I saw him come down somewhere near my building. He’s gone now.”</p><p>Lois took the elevator up to her apartment, and opened the door. Her computer was overrun with Superman-related Google alerts and Twitter notifications. She sat down to sort through everything, sipping at the cup of coffee that had lost half of its contents on the jog back home. She was on her way to the kitchen to break out the emergency instant coffee when she saw something out of the corner of her eye that made her nearly spill the rest of the cup.</p><p>She turned, and it was Superman, leaning against the kitchen counter.</p><p>“Sorry, I have to go,” she said into the phone.</p><p>He smiled at her, his usual dazzling smile, but there was something off. His breathing was hitched, he leaned too heavily against the fake marble countertop.</p><p>“What the fuck are you doing here?” Lois said.</p><p>“Thought you...thought you could give me a hand with something.” His tone was too-breezy, and he shifted his weight to steady himself as he spoke. Then, without warning, his legs gave out and he slowly slid to the ground.</p><p>“What’s wrong?” Lois exclaimed, dropping to her knees beside him.</p><p>“I uh, I got shot. I didn’t expect them to—”</p><p>“Shot? What kind of bullet could even—” Then Lois saw it, a bright green glow emanating from a bloody patch on his ribcage. “Oh fuck,” she sighed, “what kind of space alien mad science bullshit—”</p><p>Now he was on the floor, his back propped against the cabinet, his hand clutching the wound on his side. Green light seeped out between his clammy fingers, and his face looked gaunt and pale in its sickly glow. He breathed in gasps now, clenching his teeth against the pain, his eyes screwed shut.</p><p>“Superman, can you hear me?” She tried to pry his hand away from his ribs, but he held fast, a quiet yelp escaping his throat at the lightest pressure of Lois’s touch. Even after all the electric shocks and death traps, all the times he had been thrown through walls and hit with busses, Lois had never seen the Man of Steel in this state. Half conscious on the ground, weak from pain and from whatever poison the bullet was made from.</p><p>Lois ran to the medicine cabinet and collected the few first aid items she had on hand: a roll of gauze, some antiseptic, and that box of extra large band aids that she had bought by mistake one time. As she remembered how ridiculous she felt buying them—what kinds of injuries am I gonna need band aids like this for?—she half laughed, half cried at their inadequacy for the situation at hand.</p><p>Superman was on the floor now, hunched to one side with one hand covering the wound. There would be no use moving him to the couch, especially with the blood slowly leaking through his fingers, dripping onto the old tile floor.</p><p>Lois tried again to pry his hand away so she could get a better look at the wound. This time he barely put up a fight, his fingers all but going limp in hers.</p><p>Lois peered at the bulletwound—that bright green fragment lodged within tattered flesh. It wasn’t deep, at least. The bullet seemed to be lodged between two ribs. Lois thought she could see the bone, and abruptly pushed that thought away.</p><p>“What on Earth did they do to you,” Lois whispered, half to herself.</p><p>She glanced up from his wound to see the Kryptonian staring at her from the tile floor, his blue eyes suddenly wide. He grasped her wrist with a grip much too weak for a superhuman, and his lips moved silently as he tried to form words.</p><p>“No...” he said, and she leaned in closer. “Not—not Earth.”</p><p>Then, without warning, his hand fell to the floor and his body went still.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Superman is one of my favorite characters to see hurt, and yet there are barely any superman whump fics. Of course I had to take matters into my own hands, so I now present to you my first ever published fanwork, dedicated to answering that enduring question from the BvS trailer: "Do you bleed?"</p></blockquote></div></div>
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